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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22525420">At Home in a Web</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dragonwithatale/pseuds/Dragonwithatale'>Dragonwithatale</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Supernatural</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Eldritch Creature Men of Letters Bunker (Supernatural), Gen, Pre-Canon, Spiders, bunker pov, runs up through s8, the spiders aren't scary I promise</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-02-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-02-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-04-28 11:47:12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,373</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22525420</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dragonwithatale/pseuds/Dragonwithatale</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The Men of Letters moved out.</p><p>The spiders moved in.</p><p>The Bunker thinks that these new invaders have far too many legs.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Eldritch Bunker</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>At Home in a Web</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I started this ages ago, meaning it to be crack about a building being scared of spiders, and I gave myself feels instead.  No one should be surprised.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They turned the lights off, that last day.  Left the Bunker full of darkness and silence, without the whir of its vents or the computers, without any trace of warmth.</p><p>They just left.  Locked the door quietly behind them.</p><p>It waited.</p><p>This was not the first time it had lain empty.  It was normal when the caretakers changed; two would go, and then two would come, and things would live again.</p><p>But this time it waited so long, and they didn’t come back.  The dust laid over everything in a film, and then layered thicker.  Months turned into years, years slowly turned into a decade.</p><p>The Bunker wanted to be good.  It had kept itself a secret for the longest time, kept itself still and perfectly laid out, letting the Men of Letters build and rearrange and clean and live in safety.  It did not belong here.  It knew that, though it wasn’t sure why, or even why it existed in this world.</p><p>But finally it slipped.  Holding still was <em>hard</em>.  A few rooms shuffled, a hallway lengthened, the vents slipped open to breathe in fresh air.  The dust surreptitiously vanished from inside and appeared in a pile in the woods outside.</p><p>The lights stayed off, though.  It wasn’t going to cross that line yet, pretend to be the master of the place.</p><p>They’d return soon, right?</p><p>The Bunker let itself relax more, falling into utter disarray and at the same time, cleaning up.  The socks Larry had abandoned under the bed were tucked into the archives, the files were alphabetized correctly this time according to chronology of language, the dishes and linens were washed properly.  And then the Bunker replaced them wholesale because the mugs were chipped and the blankets had holes.  Furniture was repaired, books were mended, and always there was dust to get rid of.</p><p>One day, however, after the Bunker had opened several more vents, something crept its way indoors.  The Bunker didn’t notice at first, the thing was too small, and it didn’t speak or write.  But it built.  The Bunker finished sorting out the bathrooms (higher spectrum tiles went on the lower floors, and then the resonance of the room itself determined front or back), and when it returned its attention to the kitchen to ponder the tea kettle it found this... web.  It was lovely and elegant and sticky and it wouldn’t come off like the dust did.</p><p>A tiny creature sat in the center, long legs spread across the threads.  Lots of legs.  Too many legs.  How could it possibly move with that many legs?  It had so many eyes too, watching everything in the dark.  The Bunker did not like this odd little thing.</p><p>The Bunker watched for days as it wove webs and went hunting, leaving tiny corpses in tidy piles as it went.  It was making a <em>horrible</em> mess.</p><p>The Bunker didn’t dare move it, or try to throw it outside.  If the Bunker couldn’t remove the webs, how could it remove that… thing?  Surely it had powers that rivaled the Bunker itself.</p><p>Before too long a second one moved in, and another, and more and more.  They were everywhere.  It was awful, nothing was clean or orderly.  This was worse than the humans (not that they were bad, mind, not really, the Bunker liked being lived in… for the most part), because at least one of the humans would clean.  Rarely both, but someone would.</p><p>There was only one thing to do.  Like the humans who had left, the Bunker consulted the Archives, carefully turning on one solitary light to read by, like it’s humans used to.  It learned of magic, of angels and demons and faeries - dimensions and planes and gods and devils.  It learned to read the warding that traced from room to room, came to understand the limitations and strengths.</p><p>The Bunker was more powerful than it thought.  It was a safe haven, a treasury, like a great dragon protecting a mountain of gold and armor and princesses (it still did not understand keeping princesses.  Maybe one day it would meet one and find out why they were so nice.  Maybe she would stay.)  It discovered a few mentions of creatures called “spiders” that it believed matched the web-builders, but there were no pictures.  There were no pictures of anything, not of cats or dogs or dragons, rabbits, angels, trees, or flowers.  It did not know what a bird looked like, so how could it understand the beauty of an angel’s wings?  Why was a red rose like love, how did lilies unfurl, did flowers actually explode with seeds?  Mushrooms apparently did.</p><p>The world was a very dangerous place.  The wards were strong, but somehow they did not protect against mushrooms.  Or, it seemed, spiders.</p><p>But, no matter how far it read, how many odd creatures it discovered — chupacabra, lamia, striga, dragons, pookah, lake monsters — it could not find itself.  The Men of Letters had never written of a… a sentient building.  Buildings did not move, or think, or read.  Or clean.  It was an aberration.</p><p>The Bunker thought on that a long time, letting its rooms slide around slowly, watching the web-builders.  Cleaning up the remains of their food, carefully washing the filth off the walls.  It watched some webs gather dust after its maker moved on - they hung limp, useless, broken and dangling in the faint breeze from the vents.</p><p>Was that why the Men of Letters had left?  Had there been too much dust?</p><p>Had something broken?  The Bunker thought of its drifting hallways and shifting rooms - some were hidden now, and holding still was so hard.</p><p>Some webs lay empty because their maker died.  The Bunker did not like that thought.  The builders weren’t supposed to die.</p><p>The hallways stretched empty and cold and dark, and it was too much.  Lights flickered on everywhere, glowing red and bright white and pale gold, casting shadows everywhere.  Water flowed through the pipes, the vents opened further, and the furnace roared to life.  It was perfect.  It was like the humans were home again.</p><p>But they weren’t.  The warmth of summer above turned to the chill of winter; the furnace died down, the vents closed, and the lights went out one by one.  The dust settled over the floors and books.</p><p>At least the spiders stayed.  The Bunker learned to find elegance in their webs, in their long legs.  They were no longer terrifying.  They were company.  Friends even.  The Bunker on occasion snuck a few bugs in from the woods, watching as its clever little hunters stalked their prey.  Tracking vibrations, motion, the whisper of air, slight sounds, tiny little changes in the world that said something was different — they were masterful.</p><p>Time was counted in the life of a web, the span between generations, the lives of tiny friends.  Twenty generations of kitchen spider had come and gone, been mourned and gently buried in the woods (the bunker had read in the Men of Letters books how important proper burial and funeral rites were), when the Bunker felt a key touch the outer lock, footsteps thrumming on the doorstep and down the staircase.  Voices broke the silence, and the Bunker held still.</p><p>They turned on the lights.  These men, (not Men of Letters, they did not know the sequences and passwords) slowly fumbled through bringing the Bunker to life.  It helped, unlocking the computers and leaving useful rooms where they should be, and it watched in awe as they built their own web.  The slightest change in information or news or weather on this ‘internet’ sent these hunters out across the continent to chase prey, and then they’d come back.  They obviously knew all about spiders and how they hunted, they used the same techniques — yet neither of them seemed to like the Bunker’s tiny friends.</p><p>The Bunker moved the spiders out of the way if the hunters got upset and tried to kill them.  It did wish they’d stop trying to do that.  The Bunker did not like losing friends, and stepping on someone else's friends, it decided, was rude.</p><p>It also wished they’d stop bringing mushrooms in through the wards.  Mushrooms were <em>dangerous.</em></p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>The Bunker totally learns how to use the internet.  It loves pictures.  It thought cats would be more terrifying.</p><p>Documentaries are the best thing since doorknobs and the Netflix Oracle is consulted often.</p><p>Cas' wings being invisible is *terribly* confusing given that hawks are visible.</p><p>Mushrooms may show up in the dungeon when Crowley moves in.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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